This disclosure relates generally to the field of ITIL®-based (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs). (ITIL is a registered trademark of The Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury acting through The Office of Government Commerce and Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency, United Kingdom.) ITIL-based CMDBs are emerging as a prominent technology for Enterprise Management Software.
The usefulness of these CMDBs is dependent on the quality, reliability, and security of the data stored in them. A CMDB often contains data about managed resources known as Configuration Items (CIs) or configuration objects. In general, CIs correspond to real-world elements, components, or objects. ITIL version 3 defines a CI as: “Any Component that needs to be managed in order to deliver an IT Service. Information about each CI is recorded in a Configuration Record within the Configuration Management System and is maintained throughout its Lifecycle by Configuration Management. CIs are under the control of Change Management [systems]. CIs typically include IT Services, hardware, software, buildings, people, and formal documentation such as Process documentation and [Service Level Agreements].”
The CMDB serves as a point of integration between various IT management processes. Today, data is populated into the CMDB from different sources, such as spreadsheets, management tools, databases—and even manually. Such data, as it may come from a variety of sources, may have inconsistencies, and, in fact, could even be incomplete. These inconsistencies may result in at least the following problems in the CMDB: 1.) poor data quality; 2.) poor data manageability; 3.) poor data consistency; and 4.) the inability to “reconcile” CI's properly, resulting in duplicate CIs being stored in the CMDB. The process of “reconciliation” is described more fully in the document entitled, “BMC Atrium CMDB 7.5.00 Patch 001: Normalization and Reconciliation Guide,” which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, as well as U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/204,189, entitled, “Resource Reconciliation,” filed on Aug. 15, 2005 and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/669,005, entitled, “Configuration Management Database Reference Instance,” filed on Jan. 30, 2007, which applications are also hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties.
What is needed to solve the aforementioned problems is a process for ensuring that the representation of entities, e.g., CIs, is consistent across the enterprise environment, regardless of the CI's data provider. This process is referred to herein as “normalization.” A Normalization Engine (NE) may be able to “normalize” data based on certain rules and knowledge in any of the following ways: “cleaning up” the attribute values of an incoming CI based on preferred values or rule(s); cleaning up an entire collection of CIs at one time based on a preferred configuration or rule(s); or cleaning up one or more relationship CIs based on a preferred configuration or rule(s). Essentially, any attribute or characteristic relating to an entity or collection of entities may be compared to corresponding preferred value(s), configuration(s), or rule(s), and the appropriate remedial action taken, e.g., any inconsistencies found may either be logged in a report, output in the form of a warning, or the CI(s) may be updated accordingly to remove the inconsistencies. This will result in data that is more manageable, more consistent, of a higher quality, and that is able to be reconciled more effectively, along with other benefits that will become clear in light of the teachings of this disclosure.